I am delighted to be able to announce details of two events sponsored
by the LSA Information and Communication Technology Committee at the 1992
LSA meeting in Philadelphia. The first is a colloquium on "Computing and
the Ordinary Working Linguist" that takes place on Thursday night, and is
thus the leadoff event for the meeting. The second is a Linguistics Soft-
ware Exhibit that takes place the next day. I append the abstract and
schedule for the Colloquium, and the program for the Exhibit.
Subscribers to LINGUIST will note that it is intimately involved in
both of these events. Our Editors are participating in the Colloquium,
speaking about (what else?) The LINGUIST List; and all the software in
the exhibit was solicited through LINGUIST.
I want to thank all of you (especially the editors, who deserve our
thanks on plenty of other accounts as well) for helping make these events
happen. We have needed things like this for a long time and perhaps now
we will be able to get them more often.
-John Lawler jlawlerum.cc.umich.edu
University of Michigan userll3numichum.bitnet
1991 Chair, LSA Information and Communication Technology Committee
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LSA Colloquium
7 - 10 PM, Thursday, January 9, 1992
* Computing and the Ordinary Working Linguist *
Organizer: John Lawler, University of Michigan
Chair, LSA Committee on Information
and Communication Technology
Few issues (with the possible exception of ethnic food) stir such
broad and deep interest among linguists of all kinds as do discussions
on the uses, value, and shortcomings of computers in the practice of
linguistics. Unfortunately such discussions only rarely lead to useful
dialogue because there is no good common venue for the shared experience
of the practitioners. We intend this colloquium to provide such a
venue, and hope this will become an annual event, if there is sufficient
interest on the part of the membership.
This colloquium grows out of last year's membership survey by the
LSA's Committee on Information and Communication Technology. A number
of issues surfaced repeatedly there to which we will attempt to speak.
One of them -- the lack of knowledge about what software is available
and the consequent daily re-inventions of the wheel -- is addressed in
part by the Software Exhibit. In this colloquium, offered in conjunc-
tion with, but separate from, the Exhibit, we will report on the results
of the user survey, and then try to bring together in one event a series
of reports on what's new, what's old, and what's now possible in a few
of the many potential areas where computing has affected the practice of
the linguistic profession.
There are dozens of these, but since we have limited time, we have
chosen the four below, both as varying considerably from the usual fare
of computational linguistics, and as representing areas of interest to
the broadest possible variety of linguists:
o The LINGUIST list has become, in the space of less than one
year, an indispensable adjunct to hundreds of LSA members,
not to speak of linguists overseas, and its importance can
only grow. It is a genuinely novel phenomenon which deserves
to be made more widely known.
o Phonetics and phonology are something almost every linguist
has to cope with, regardless of research interest, in intro-
ductory classes and elsewhere, because of their basic relev-
ance to the field and their lack of treatment elsewhere.
Any help computing can provide us in this is welcome.
o Text studies of many kinds have become increasingly impor-
tant in recent years, primarily depending on increases in
usefulness of computational resources. But even for linguists
who don't work primarily on large texts, the idea of being
able to search the OED on-line, for instance, has a certain
natural appeal.
o Finally, a large number of linguists are occupied in field work;
it has informed the history and nature of our discipline enor-
mously. These linguists have special needs, and have devel-
oped special computational resources to meet them which are
interesting and useful for other linguists as well.
Speakers will make 15-minute presentations with 5-10 minutes for
discussion after each; discussants have 10 minutes each; the remainder
of the time is available for public discussion. Speakers and their
topics are:
(0) John Lawler University of Michigan
Survey report and prospects for the profession
(1) Helen Dry Eastern Michigan University
& Anthony Aristar Texas A&M University
The LINGUIST list
(2) Keith Denning Eastern Michigan University
Phonetics and computing
(3) Thomas Toon University of Michigan
Large corpora and text encoding
(4) Evan Antworth Summer Institute of Linguistics
Computing in the field
Discussants:
Peter Ladefoged UCLA
James Hoard Boeing Corporation, Seattle
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LSA Software Exhibit
10 AM -- 7 PM, Friday, January 10, 1992
The Software Exhibit will take place in one large room, with machines
(1 DOS, 2 Macs, various Unix) installed around it. The first hour is
unscheduled; the presenters will be present to meet and discuss their
programs individually, like a poster session. Between 11 am and 5:30 pm,
two or more individual demonstrations will be going on at once at opposite
ends of the room. The time between 5:30 and 7 PM, when the room will
close, is likewise unscheduled.
The schedule for demonstrations begins with Text Preparation software
(fonts, example renumbering, bibliography), moves to Data Analysis programs
(VARBRUL, concordance, and phonetics programs), segues to Educational soft-
ware (Hypercard stacks and other tutorials), and ends with Natural Language
Processing programs. Since much software is multi-purpose, the transitions
between categories are fuzzy, and we have decided not to label the sessions
as such, but to depend on our colleagues to draw their own boundaries as
necessary.
We wish to thank the Local Arrangements committee, and especially Mark
Liberman, for strenuous efforts in making this exhibit possible. We also
wish to thank IBM and Sun for making workstations available for
demonstrations.
SCHEDULE
10-11 Opening ("poster" session - informal demonstrations, wander
around, meet one another, see what's going on, etc.)
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11 DOS: Phonetics fonts Phonetics bitmap fonts and drivers
Timothy Montler for WordPerfect and the HP
Univ of North Texas Laserjet printer.
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Mac: Palatino Phonetic font A Type 1 Postscript (and TrueType)
Henry Rogers laser font following the 1989 IPA
Univ of Toronto (available also for Windows w/ ATM).
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11:30 DOS: Old English and phonemic fonts for the PC-Write Lite
Lawrence Foley, James Madison Univ word processor.
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Mac: HyperBibliography A HyperCard bibliographic database,
Christopher Culy formatter, and extractor.
University of Iowa
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12 DOS: RENUMBER Example renumbering program
Jonathon Mead, UCLA (Mac version demonstrated at 12:30)
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Mac: SuperRenumber Example renumbering program
Christopher Culy, University of Iowa
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12:30 DOS: NUM Example renumbering program
David Denison, University of Manchester
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Mac: RENUMBER Example renumbering program
Jonathon Mead, UCLA (DOS version demonstrated at 12)
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1 DOS: GOLDVARB A joint presentation of the Mac and DOS versions
Sharon Ash of the widely-used VARBRUL program for analysis
Mac: IVARB of sociolinguistic data and formulation of
Susan Pintzuk variable rules.
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Mac: Conc SIL-developed concordance generator program
Evan Antworth, SIL
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1:30 DOS: UPSID UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database
Ian Maddieson, UCLA
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Mac: Phonetic Symbol Guide HyperCard version of the 1986 book
Allen, Pullum, & Ladusaw by Pullum & Ladusaw, with example
Purdue Univ & UC Santa Cruz sounds installed
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2 Mac: Acoustics for Phoneticians Interactive HyperCard tutorial
Peter Ladefoged, UCLA in basic concepts of acoustics.
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Mac: Signalyze A review and demonstration of the
Keith Denning commercial phonetic analysis program.
Eastern Michigan University
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Sun SPARC: EDW Speech waveform display and
Bunnell & Mohamed editing program.
University of Delaware (available also for DOS)
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2:30 Mac: The LX problems Hypercard tutorial automating data problems
William Labov for introductory linguistics students.
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Mac: Sounds of the World's Languages Hypercard database and
Ladefoged & Maddieson tutorial program.
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3 Mac: Phthong Tutorial program for English phonemic notation.
Henry Rogers, Univ of Toronto
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Mac: A World of Words HyperCard stacks automating various
John Lawler, Univ of Michigan topics in linguistics and etymology
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3:30 DOS: ProfCourse An automated tutorial course in Prolog
Dik & Kahrel designed for linguists.
Univ of Amsterdam
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Mac: Semantics Tutorial Hypercard tutorial.
Victor Raskin, Purdue Univ
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4 DOS: ProfGlot A multilingual language processor with
Dik & Kahrel generation, parsing and translation of Dutch,
Univ of Amsterdam English, German, French, Danish, Spanish.
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Sun SPARC: ELU A unification-based linguistic development
Dominique Estival environment for building NLP systems
Univ de Geneve
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4:30 Mac: FrameBuilder A HyperCard expert system for building
Donalee Attardo semantic frames for computational linguistics.
Purdue Univ
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IBM RS/6000: STUF A (theory-neutral) unification-based grammar
Bosch & Seiffert formalism for developing and testing grammars.
IBM Deutschland
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5 DOS: Morphogen Morphological analysis with rule compiler
Joseph Pentheroudakis and analyzer for several languages.
ECS Inc, Provo UT
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Mac: AV Parser A unification-based parser for research
Mark Johnson purposes, with full graphics interface.
Brown Univ
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5:30-7 Informal demonstrations, etc.
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7 PM Exhibit Room closes.